Month: April 2017

When I talked to a marketing consultant, she advised that I needed a logo as soon as possible. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t follow up on that for over a year.

Last month I met with Pixel Parlor, a local design studio. I showed some of the art from the game and discussed my overall goals (e.g. it’s unlikely that we’ll have a physical box, which drove the King of Dragon Pass logo). In the meeting they asked me two questions I didn’t have an answer for: what were some logos I liked? And what were competitive games?

It turned out that was an interesting search. There are an awful lot of clichéd logos for fantasy computer games! So I broadened my search to include paper & dice RPGs and board games. For digital games, I thought the Monkey Island and Legend of Zelda series worked well. I liked the current Dungeons & Dragons logo, with the draconic ampersand (though it doesn’t work as well as D&D, since the three glyphs smudge together without enough contrast). The Fate logo also stood out. And the Scythe boardgame had a good logo.

As for competitive games, since Six Ages will be similar to King of Dragon Pass, there’s really nothing else like it. I suspect it will appeal to people who also like Sunless Sea, 80 Days, Sorcery, Banner Saga, Out There, and Reigns. But I also wouldn’t say they’re competition.

I ran the designs by the Six Ages team and Chaosium (licensor of the setting). There was no clear consensus, so I asked Pixel Parlor to iterate on the two favorites. Here’s a couple examples from round 2:

Again I asked what the team thought. Again there wasn’t a definite favorite. I zoomed out to see all the logos at the same time. When they were small, it seemed like the carved style font was the most recognizable at small sizes. Which would be important in say a Steam listing.

I didn’t really like the E that looked like a greek Σ, however. So I asked for another set of variations. Again there wasn’t a clear winner, but I finally picked the one that wasn’t likely to be confused for a game about ancient Greece.

Hopefully this will prove distinctive and help suggest what the game is about (one of the artists noted that the lettering reminded him of the Gloranthan runes). At any rate, it’s nice seeing in the game.

The official role of QA (Quality Assurance) in software projects is to assure quality — that is, the software works as designed, and the design is reasonable. They find bugs.

But in a game, they do more. QA plays the game more than anyone, and has the best sense of how it works. Is it fun? Is it too hard or too easy? Does the UI work? What’s missing?

In King of Dragon Pass, the “heroic combat” concept came about because Rob Heinsoo felt something was lacking. (He ended up writing most of these scenes, too.)

I just finished implementing a suggestion from Liana Kerr:

I feel like there’s not a lot of connection between your opening questionnaire and your clan management. I have no emotional connection to the fact that we know the secrets of [redacted], because it’s never referenced again.

Well, it now is. And while a few questions don’t get an explicit mention later, I just made sure that every answer from two questions shows up in at least one scene. (The others are at least mentioned implicitly, like your ancestral enemy, or give bonuses in scenes.)

Earlier, she suggested

Advice about raiding-related promises currently shows up in the War screen, but if you go to the Raid screen, it doesn’t. As a player I’d be more likely to expect to see it in the Raid screen and would entirely miss it in the War screen.

and

One problem I’ve always had with KoDP is that someone dies and I immediately forget who they were — that is, I just see the name and I don’t necessarily connect it with the face that I’ve been looking at for several years. It may be a little different with Six Ages, since the UI is a little different with the ring members’ names underneath their pictures … Two suggestions: …

and so on. More good ideas that got implemented.

For that matter, it’s not just QA that can influence the game. Much of the current combat feedback is based on a suggestion by Jan Pospíšil.

Not every team suggestion ends up in the game. Some are still on the backlog of possible tasks. But more input makes for a higher quality game.